The use of thermal or infrared (IR) images for determining parameters, often a temperature, of an object is well-known in the art. Often, an IR camera is used at a location where a plurality of objects are present, and by capturing images of said objects their individual temperatures can be determined from the resulting image or images. By creating a large series of images during operation of the IR camera, the user can see the object scene presented to the camera in close to real time, and when the camera is moved in relation to the objects displayed, the movement can be seen in the images shown to the user.
Often, the user intends to determine the temperature of one or more of the objects in the object scene, and this can be crudely measured by watching the images created and evaluating roughly what temperatures specific displayed colors correspond to, in order to arrive at a general idea. For a more accurate measurement, the user can generally maneuver a user interface, for instance by selecting options in menus displayed by the camera or moving a marker or the like to select a specific point in the image and reading a temperature measurement somewhere on the camera. The process of arriving at such measurements is generally time-consuming and requires multiple step selection processes where different input is given such as pressing buttons or scrolling an image before a measurement can be read. The placing of markers frame by frame in a series of live or still images is generally known in the art.
Sometimes, however, the user is operating the camera in an environment where such lengthy procedures are unsuitable, such as environments where the user can only be present during a short period of time. There can for instance be an unpleasant location due to chemical substances or radiation that are harmful to a human, and where protective equipment such as gloves make the interaction with a camera increasingly difficult.
An available option can be to save the images created by the camera to a memory unit and performing a thorough analysis later, using the camera itself or a computer or other processing unit with a suitable software program. This has the advantage of eliminating the problems described above, but if the measurements are required for performing an operation on the location, the user will have to return to this location after the analysis has been performed and finish the tasks there. This can present any number of problems, however, when speed and accuracy is important and the wait for the measurements to be completed can be unacceptable.
Known examples of prior art are shown by US Patent 20070087311 (Garvey) and by US Patent 20060289768 (Vallese), where systems for marking at least one area of an image are shown. A further example of prior art is found in the patent document U.S. Pat. No. 6,606,115 B1. None of these documents, however, address the problems mentioned above.
There is therefore clearly a need for a more efficient manner of marking objects in an image of an IR camera and performing measurements on said objects, in order to avoid the problems described above.